There are lots of opinions as to whether we're winning the war against Islamic terrorists, which President Bush has dubbed as the more politically palatable but inaccurate "war on terror."
We certainly seem to have won in Iraq, and will probably mop up in Afghanistan as we transfer more military resources from Iraq to that theatre. But a case can be made that until we go after and eliminate the ideological root of Islamic terror, from the maddrasses in Pakistan to the Saudi money supporting jihadis, we 're not winning.
But whether we're winning today or not, as I told some college students recently: if what you see in this photo ever happens, we lost. It doesn't matter what follows. We will have lost.
By the way, this is an artist's depiction from the video game "Fallout 3" of what a nuclear attack would do to Washington, DC. I should add that I am not a big believer in the scenario dubbed "American Hiroshima, " in which terrorists are able to smuggle in a nuke, prep it, arm it and detonate it without being detected. I think 9/11 was only possible because our guard as a people was completely down and our intelligence capability was disorganized and weak.
I stepped onto Manhattan around midnight following 9/11, having driven up from Virginia because all flights were grounded. And as I approached from New Jersey, I saw the dust cloud suspended over lower Manhattan, illuminated by work lights, and appearing to me almost as a physical manifestation of the presence or concern of God.
Since that day I've been following radical Islam, the terror threat and the political fallout of 9/11, sometimes full time, sometimes part time, and have wondered how and when this war would end. I think of George Friedman's prediction several years ago at Stratfor.com that the war on terror would end in Pakistan. It looked strange to my eyes then. It doesn't seem so strange now.
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